The second wave of the coronavirus in Australia appears to be finally subsiding, but the country isn’t out of the woods yet.
Australia had its first covid-19 outbreak under control by the end of April, but was hit by a new wave in June that has been even bigger and deadlier than the first.
The fresh outbreak occurred after the virus escaped two hotels in Melbourne, Victoria, that were being used to quarantine citizens returning from overseas. Security guards working at the hotels contracted the virus from infected guests and it then spread to the community.
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Since this leak, almost 17,000 people in Victoria have caught the virus and 411 have died. In comparison, about 1400 Victorians were infected and 19 died during the first outbreak.
The explosiveness of the second outbreak has been attributed to the virus finding its way into public housing towers, care centres for older people and other highly connected communities.
Melbourne was placed under lockdown on 8 July to try to contain the virus, with residents only permitted to leave their homes to buy essentials, access medical care, exercise or go to school or work. After cases continued to climb, mask-wearing in public became mandatory throughout the city on 22 July, and an additional 8pm to 5am curfew was imposed on 2 August. A few days later, on 5 August, the rest of Victoria was placed under lockdown. Tests have also been offered to anyone with even mild cold or flu symptoms.
These strict measures seem to finally be working. Daily new cases have been steadily declining from a high of 723 on 30 July to 116 on 24 August – the lowest recorded in more than two months. At the same time, the R number, which is an estimate of how many people are likely to catch covid-19 from a single infected individual, has dropped from above 3 before the lockdown to around 0.5. “We’ve clearly turned a major corner,” says Catherine Bennett at Deakin University in Melbourne.
The next challenge for Victoria will be how to come out of lockdown safely. The current restrictions are scheduled to continue until 13 September, but the government says they will be extended if necessary. The state’s chief health officer Brett Sutton told a press conference on 21 August that there was no “magic number” of new daily cases that would allow restrictions to be eased, but said he would feel “very relaxed” if they were in single digits.
Sutton said the government would also consider a “smorgasbord” of other factors, including the number of new cases with unknown sources, before deciding when and how to reopen.
This is a sensible approach, says Bennett. “It doesn’t just depend on the numbers but where the last remaining cases are,” she says. “If all the cases are linked to known outbreaks, then we’ll know we’ve got a good handle on it.”
“I expect there’ll be a lot of caution about relaxing restrictions because it would just be too traumatic for us to keep going back and forth into lockdown,” says Hassan Vally at La Trobe University in Melbourne.
To prevent a third wave from occurring once restrictions are eased, it will be crucial to continue high rates of testing and to conduct aggressive contact tracing of positive cases, say Bennett and Vally.
This strategy has worked well in neighbouring New South Wales. Covid-19 crossed into the state from Victoria on 3 July when an infected man from Melbourne visited a busy pub in Sydney. “After seeing what happened in Victoria, contact tracers in New South Wales were all about going hard and going early, meaning they were already chasing up contacts of contacts of contacts within 10 days of that initial exposure,” says Bennett.
This has allowed New South Wales to rapidly shut down new chains of transmission and to keep the number of new daily cases to between 1 and 22 since the spillover occurred seven weeks ago.
Vally believes this is a more practical approach than locking down immediately when new cases spring up, which was New Zealand’s response after recording its first four locally acquired cases in three months on 11 August. “New South Wales has shown that if you swing into action really quickly, you can get on top of these small clusters without having to shut down,” he says.
